On 2 May 1969 Prince Philip cut the ribbon on the strangest port in the world. There were no docks, no piers, no jetties at the Ramsgate International Hoverport - just a flat concrete pad sloping down into Pegwell Bay. The vessels that used it had no propellers and no rudders, and never actually touched the sea while they were moving. The SR.N4 hovercraft Swift and Sure were enormous machines, each one as big as a small ferry but riding on a cushion of air, driven by four turboprop engines turning huge propellers high above the hull. They could carry hundreds of passengers and dozens of cars across the Channel to Calais in 40 minutes. For thirteen years, this was how the future was supposed to look.
The company Hoverlloyd had started operations with smaller SR.N6 craft from a pad within Ramsgate Harbour, but they needed somewhere with room for larger vessels. They considered options along the Kent coast and settled on Pegwell Bay - a wide, shallow estuary between Ramsgate and Sandwich, sheltered from heavy weather by the Goodwin Sands offshore. Local opposition was fierce. Bird watchers worried about the bay's important wildlife. Coastline conservationists objected. Yacht operators feared the disruption. The Kent Trust for Nature Conservation - now the Kent Wildlife Trust - raised money to buy 100 acres of land specifically to block the development. Multiple public inquiries followed. The inspector Charles Hilton eventually recommended approval, and ministerial consent came on 10 January 1968. A second inquiry the previous September had considered British Rail's competing plan for a hoverport at Dover; the resolution was that both ports should be built, since they would offer different services.
Cementation began construction in July 1968 and the port cost 1.5 million pounds. The opening on 2 May 1969 coincided with the delivery of Hoverlloyd's first two large craft, Swift and Sure. The SR.N4, designed by Sir Christopher Cockerell's hovercraft company, was a startling machine: 39 metres long, weighing around 200 tonnes loaded, with four Rolls-Royce Marine Proteus gas turbines driving lift fans and propellers. The cushion of air it rode on lifted it about eight feet off the water, allowing it to traverse beach, estuary, and open sea with the same blunt indifference. From a passenger seat the noise was tremendous - the turbines screamed - and the ride could be alarming in heavy weather, with the craft slamming through the wave-tops rather than over them. But the speed was real. Calais was 40 minutes away.
Through the 1970s the hoverport ran four craft. The first SR.N4 Mark II - the Prince of Wales, registration GH-2054 - started Ramsgate operations on 18 June 1977. The Mark II was a stretched version with greater capacity and improved seakeeping. Hoverlloyd carried hundreds of thousands of passengers and tens of thousands of cars across the Channel each summer. The journey times were unmatched. Then came the 1973 oil crisis and a second oil shock in 1979. Hovercraft drink kerosene at extraordinary rates - the turbines, the lift fans, the propellers all consume fuel like aircraft engines, and the SR.N4 in particular was a notorious gas guzzler. Suddenly the economics that had made the cushion-of-air revolution affordable started looking thin. In 1979 Hoverlloyd was put up for sale as a condition of the Swedish government's bailout of its parent company, the Brostrom Shipping Group. No buyer came forward.
In 1981 Hoverlloyd merged with its loss-making rival Seaspeed, which had operated the British Rail hoverport at Dover. The merged company was called Hoverspeed. Thanet's MP William Rees-Davies told the local chamber of commerce that the merger would not threaten Ramsgate operations. He was wrong, or rather he was overruled by the fuel-cost arithmetic. The 1982 season ran from Ramsgate under the Hoverspeed branding, but at the end of October 1982 the last departure left Pegwell Bay and all passenger and vehicle services moved to Dover. The hoverport remained briefly as an operational and maintenance base, but its working life was effectively over.
The site refused to settle into a peaceful retirement. A go-kart circuit called Ramsgate Kart Circuit opened on the north-east end of the site in 1993, using part of the old maintenance building. Parts of the site were also rented out as satellite lorry parking for ferries from Port Ramsgate, run by Sally Line and Oostende Lines. Both uses ended in 1995. Then came the most ambitious of the proposals: a leisure complex with 250 holiday apartments, an indoor ski slope, an ice rink, and a swimming pool, proposed by Jimmy Godden of Dreamland Margate and partly funded by European Union grants. The Environment Secretary John Gummer approved it. But negotiations between Godden and Thanet District Council broke down in 1996, and the scheme collapsed. The hoverport site is now disused. The hovercraft pad, the car-marshalling area, and the approach road are still visible from the air - a strange concrete apron at the edge of the bird reserve, where for thirteen years giant cushioned vessels slid out of the sea bearing passengers to France.
Ramsgate Hoverport occupied the western shore of Pegwell Bay at 51.327 degrees N, 1.372 degrees E, between Ramsgate and Sandwich. The former hovercraft pad and approach road are still identifiable from altitude as a distinctive concrete apron at the edge of the Pegwell Bay National Nature Reserve. Manston Airport (decommissioned) is 1.5 nm north-west and visible from the same approach. Calais lies 25 nm east across the Channel. Best viewed at 1,000-2,000 feet AGL approaching the Isle of Thanet from the east.